Tasks or obligations in an application program environment typically depend on the specific application domain. Tasks or obligations may for example be the updating of a file in a database, entering a customer's details in the context of opening an account, approving or rejecting a credit, or opening a legal case.
In the paper-based world, tasks are continuously created, delegated or discharged according to the overall goals of an organisation and the general principles governing the distribution of work within an organisation. These principles would typically comprise a framework for maintaining control over the supervision and responsibility of task completion.
Although workflow products (e.g., the SAP Webflow product), and non-workflow products (e.g., Outlook) support the delegation of tasks, the available delegation functionalities of these application programs are rudimentary. This lack of sophistication often results in uncertainty as to the person responsible for currently performing a task, the origin and ownership of the initial task and the delegation sequence of the task. It may further be difficult for a principal who delegated a task to find out whether a task has in fact been completed. Also, the present delegation functionalities provided by application programs may not provide the information required to identify the person who is ultimately responsible to ensure that each single operation in a task has been performed.
In application programs, whether based on workflow or not, a need has therefore been identified to provide a method that would enable improved management of delegated tasks.
Prior art systems relate mostly to the requirements pertaining to a delegation and the rules governing such delegation in application systems.
In prior art systems, the concept of delegation and its technical realisation has only been considered in the context of information security, e.g. delegation of access rights at an operating system level. In prior art systems the concept of “review” has only been considered in the context of obligation/event-condition-action rules in policy-based distributed systems such as the management of firewalls or routers.